Hi –This is Mitchell Rose, the filmmaker of “Case Studies from the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders” referred to above as the obvious source for the idea for the video “Her Morning Elegance.” (And also of “Learn to Speak Body” which I see is featured on the next page of this blog.) In response to Jo’s comment: “The point is that it does not matter where you take this from as where you take them to..” I have to disagree. From the point of view of the world of viewers, it’s understandable to have the attitude “Show me great films and I don’t want/need to know where they come from.” As a filmmaker, my point of view is, I came up with this idea and it’s wrong for someone else to profit from my idea. I’m an independent filmmaker producing his own work at his own expense. It’s not easy to eek out a living doing this. So how do you think I feel when all of a sudden I start getting emails from people saying, You should sue them. When a film like this achieves this type of success, opportunities emerge — the filmmakers will get calls from various companies now inquiring about paying gigs. I could use some paying gigs. This is not the first time this has happened to me. I’ve seem other clear ripoffs of my work play in prime time national TV broadcasts, making the filmmakers famous. It’s extremely frustrating. So I’m sorry, it does matter where you “TAKE this from.” Intellectual property — ideas — are all an artist has.

It´s also from 2002, like the movie of Mitchell. I guess the idea is good but not that exceptional that it could come from somebody else at the same time. I think sometimes the technical, digital opportunities of our days generate these ideas automatically. Because it´s possible, it´s done.

Well, most of us spend a significant portion of our life rolling around in beds, film artists included. It’s a simple enough idea, I don’t see why they couldn’t have come from different heads coming to their own separate conclusions.

People think in similar ways. That’s why we’re able to communicate with each other, why we’re able to fall in love, and why different people often arrive at the same idea or conclusion completely independently. Jung would call it the “collective unconscious”. It happens all the time in art, and it happens all the time in science. (Darwin, for example; some other guy published the same theory first, without being aware of Darwin’s ideas. And speaking of Darwin, there are so many animals out there that look so similar that they should be related, but they haven’t shared lineage for billions of years… it’s called convergent evolution. Ideas do the same thing.)

I don’t mean to make small of the crime of intellectual property theft. But bottom line, I don’t think there’s any proof to conclusively say that those producers stole it. If you send me CCTV footage of them climbing into the window of your house/studio/wherever-you-keep-your-reels in the dead of night, fully outfitted in cat suits, maybe then I’ll change my mind. :-D

And on the off-chance that you do actually have such footage in your possession… I’m not going to say that you have to, but I’ll say that you could turn around and take it as a compliment that others were inspired by your work. (For the record, very few of Shakespeare’s plays were original stories: most of them were based on old myths or ideas that other playwrights wrote first… but no one denies that Shakespeare was a genius in his own right, wherever the ideas for his stories came from.)

Now, I’ll say that I completely understand your frustration over the fact that someone who has an idea not too different to yours earning considerably more profit by it. Hell, I’d be pissed off too. But the sad thing about art (all intellectual property, in fact) is that fame/financial gain doesn’t come back to the artist in proportion to merit of the artwork…. and there really is no way of objectively gauging merit in the first place, it’s all entirely specific to the viewer. That’s the tricky thing about intellectual work… I work in a lab, and it’s a constant fight to get your ideas out there before someone else thinks of it, which happens oftener than you’d expect.

I don’t think you can say you invented stop motion animation. As Julia said above, ideas can be independently thought of. Just think of writing arising independently across the ancient world.

That being said, I think the reason Oren Lavie’s video is such a big hit is because his is a music video. There is a catchy tune behind the video, there’s vivid colors.

That’s not to take away from the amazing choreography of your video but he just packaged his for popular consumption. Yours, while intending to be satirical, would appear on search results to the general webbers as a drab clinical short.